AI in Development: Finding Better Stories, Faster

Development is the lifeblood of any production company. Without a healthy development slate, there are no commissions, no productions, no company.

It’s also one of the most inefficient parts of the entire industry.

Development is expensive and largely invisible

Most of the work in development never results in a commission. Producers spend weeks researching stories, building contributor lists, testing ideas, writing treatments — and the majority of it leads nowhere. That’s the nature of the business.

But just because waste is inherent in development doesn’t mean it can’t be reduced. And AI is starting to make development dramatically more efficient.

Research that used to take weeks

Building a development file used to mean days of desk research, cold calls, web searches, archive requests. Building a contributor list meant phoning around, following leads, maintaining a contacts database that lived in someone’s head or on a shared spreadsheet nobody kept updated.

AI tools can now compress much of that research into hours. Semantic search across media libraries means archive that would have taken weeks to surface can be found in minutes. Cross-referencing contributors across projects becomes instant.

MotionHub’s boards keep development organised

MotionHub’s kanban-style boards are purpose-built for the development phase. Each project can have its own development board — tracking research threads, contributor leads, archive sources, and story angles in a visual, collaborative workspace.

No more research living in someone’s inbox. No more contributor lists scattered across different people’s computers. Everything is in one place, visible to the whole development team, searchable and up to date.

From development to production without losing the thread

One of the biggest inefficiencies in TV production is the handover from development to production. The context that was built up during development — the research, the contributor relationships, the archive — often gets lost as the project moves into a different phase with a different team.

Because MotionHub holds both development and production in the same platform, that handover becomes seamless. The board becomes the task list. The research becomes the media library. The treatment becomes the script. Nothing gets lost.

Start your development slate in MotionHub.